Wednesday 30 July 2008

Jog The Web: The Whistle Stop Tour of My Favourites on My Languages

With Jog The Web you can organise a guided tour of your site or blog as well as comment on the pages you like.

A few weeks ago, Marie-France Perkins created her own Jog The Web mfl tracks , blogged about this tool and started a discussion about it on the mfl resources Yahoo group.
All agreed that this tool has a lot of potential to highlight particular features in a website or a blog or to recommend specific websites in the face of the digital information overload both teachers and students often have to cope with.

In addition to recommending your own favourite blog posts or sites, it is also worth checking the site for the creations of fellow language teachers (rss feed available for all new creations). A similar system to VodPod, enabling registered members to follow like-minded colleagues would be useful.

However, a quick look was enough to unearth some “tracks” produced by Ana Maria Cult for EFL and James Pearson for Spanish recommendations .
I also found some recommendations of sites for practising foreign languages and of ICT resources to develop speaking skills .

Jog The Web could also be used for student homework or to show a series of websites within a lesson using the IWB, for instance, without having to open and close web pages as Jog The Web also has a very handy slideshow feature.

Have a look at my own creation on
Look at Comments for an update from Jog The Web's CEO-new version to be released in September...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this post!

I'm Rémy Wilders and CEO of JogTheWeb. It is really rewarding to read about how you appreciate our service!

I would like to make the most of your post to inform you that a new version of JogTheWeb should be out in September, this year. We really trust (hope) it will be a nice step forward.

There is also the "frame buster" topic I need to address. As you may have noticed some pages (such as the forth step in this post’s track… and I feel terrible about it) "break" the track by removing the reader. This is due to the fact that we have wanted

1) to provide you with a pure web solution for viewing tracks (i.e. no plug-in to download prior to viewing a track)
2) to display the real internet pages (not copies) in order for them to be browsable by your visitors before jogging on to the next step.

For doing so we display the pages in a "frame" above the reader. Some pages (sometimes for valid security reasons) refuse to be displayed in such frames and hence "bust" any frame they meet.

We have been looking for workarounds but it is far from simple .

As of today frame busters should, unfortunately, be removed from a track.

In September, when building a track it will be possible to add a frame buster as long as you signal it (by a checkbox) as a frame buster. By doing so, the link will be displayed in the frame above the reader instead of the page itself. If a visitor clicks on the link the page will be displayed in a pop-up. This is far from perfect… we are working on a better solution for down the road. Fortunately there are not many frame busters out there.

Once again thanks for your interest and I hope you’ll appreciate the coming version!

Anonymous said...

This looks such a useful tool - I wanted to experiment with links to particular areas of grammar so that classes could work on those at home, and also with "treasure hunts" (webquests). Need to find out first if "jog the web" is blocked in school (almost certainly will be) and get it unblocked - well I can hope!

Anonymous said...

@icpj great tour, thanks!

@remy you probably meant page 5 (instead of 4) of icpj's track. If you load it completely the reader disapears... I suppose icpj sould remove that step... (may be reference it in a comment?)

mmehenderson said...

Bonne rentrée! Thanks for being such an inspiration and for keeping me so excited about teaching! I'm constantly learning new things from you and it makes this 23rd year of teaching my most exciting yet. Have a great year!
Andrea